


History

by lesbianettes



Series: Best Interest [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: On God we gon get Nile some therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:28:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25992151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianettes/pseuds/lesbianettes
Summary: Nile's first therapy appointment.
Series: Best Interest [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1878610
Comments: 4
Kudos: 66





	History

Nile goes first, as a show of trust in them and to prove she genuinely believes in this too. She knows she could benefit as well, anyways, and there’s not much to lose from going to talk to someone who just wants to help her. They’re all here, booked for the day, one after another to start to process everything, and while she waits, she observes them. Andy is very specifically not reading the book in her arms, while Joe mumbles frantically and Nicky attempts to calm him down. There’s no others, not now. It’s private. They doubled the rates for this confidentiality, filled in the woman ahead of time to prepare her, and made sure it was safe. Even so, they’re all well armed. 

“Nile?”

The woman has a gentle face and glasses on the edge of her nose, smiling as Nile gets up to follow her into the cozy office, reminiscent of one from a childhood that feels so many more than a single lifetime ago. Andy got her a copy of whatever diagnosis she received in her early days, and Nile hasn’t looked at it, even up to the time that she hands it face down to the person who promised to help them work through things. It has only a few lines of text on it. She knows Andy read it, and that whatever she saw, she likely told Joe and Nicky. Joe wouldn’t have retained it. But Nicky must know, at the very least.

She takes a seat on the couch and stretches her legs out, plays with the zippers on her pant legs to have something to do. It’s a comforting series of noises, like a scratch on the inside of her ears, to fill the silence while Angela looks over the paper and waits for Nile to make the first move. 

“It says here you were diagnosed with severe PTSD and autism when you were nine.” Neither of those things are on Nile’s memory. She remembers her mother reassuring her, and the school being a little nicer to her for a month or so following the psychiatrist visit. “How well are you managing that presently?”

“I didn’t know I had either of those things.”

As much as she wants to say no one told her, because she truly doesn’t remember it, she has a lot of missing pieces from her childhood. Perhaps that could be explained by the PTSD, although she doesn’t recall a major trauma. 

“Does it say what caused it?”

“Autism doesn’t have a cause, Nile-”

“No,” she corrects. She’s not ready to talk about that, delve into it and what it means. It’s harder, somehow, than exploring a childhood trauma that hurt her permanently but she can’t remember. Autism is something she has a clinical understanding of from a high school psychology course, something she saw on TV as scary and leaving a person that doesn’t function like her. The media says it’s a young boy, a quiet boy, a boy who needs support and has it, a boy who can’t do things for himself like have conversations, let alone kill. She doesn’t know what to do with it, and so she chooses to pretend she didn’t hear it. “Does the file say why I had PTSD?”

Angela looks at her for a moment, then shakes her head. “No, not here. And I understand why you don’t want me to reach out and figure it out from a third party. We can work on uncovering those memories, if that’s what you want. Do you still have symptoms? Panic attacks, nightmares, flashbacks…?”

She thinks of her first death, in the desert with Dizzy trying to hold her throat together. There was blood, and she remembers how cold she felt, despite the heat. It’s returned to her often in flashes, in her dreams, just the same as when she idly finds a weapon in her hand. She dreams of Dizzy’s blurry face. She remembers too, crying out,  _ I’m trying to save you, man _ , before her throat was slit. 

“Kind of. Just- just not of anything when I was a kid. It’s just something that happened while I was overseas. And sometimes some other stuff that happened, but it’s not too bad. Not like with the others. Especially Joe.”

“Their traumas and responses to it doesn’t invalidate your own struggles, Nile. You’re allowed to be upset, or afraid, or angry, or anything. It’s okay to need to heal.”

Nile shrugs. It’s not that big of a deal, comparatively. But that must be the point, she supposes, to be aware that regardless of what the others have gone through, she has the opportunity to feel for herself, and it’s alright for her to be suffering. On some level, she does recognize that there’s something fundamentally unhealthy about how often she sits there and makes herself bleed. It’s not what she should be doing to cope with all she’s experienced.

“I jumped out of a penthouse window,” she admits, “to save Andy. I fell I think thirty or forty stories onto a car, and I was dead for a minute or two. It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt. All my bones had to set all over again. I watched my fingers realign right in front of my face, and then Nicky and Joe helped me stand up. I was still healing in the car ride back. It hurt all day, I think, and it might have been just my imagination. But it hurt. I keep waking up thinking I’ve fallen again.”

She leaves out the fact that she took Merrick with her, and they left his body behind in the wreckage of the car. That would be too much, even for Angela. And to be honest, Nile doesn’t feel like going to prison any time soon, especially when the other prisoners or heaven forbid the guards, realize that she’s immortal. It would be a different kind of hell. She trusts that the others would at least try to save her, but there are no guarantees given the state everyone is in right now. 

“I did what I had to,” she says. “But it really fucking hurt.”

Nicky held her hand back at the safehouse, after. She wasn’t sure if it was really healed. So he held it and told her that it was alright, and he remained as kind as she originally knew him to be for a few days before the anger overtook him. She wonders if it’s her fault. But she’s afraid if she even mentions it, it’ll be confirmed that she’s the one who broke him into something raw and rigid and sharp. 

“I showed up when Andy lost her immortality,” Nile tells Angela instead. 

“Okay?”

Nile shrugs and looks at the ceiling. “I think I was born to replace her.”

“Let’s imagine for a second that that’s true. That you did become immortal for no other reason than to take Andy’s place. Did you choose to be immortal?”

“No, of course not.”

“Did you join your new friends with the intent to replace Andy?”

“No!”

Angela gives her a hint of a smile. “So then, even if it is the case, you had no say in it- which means it’s not your fault.”

On a logical level, that makes sense. She’s walked through this with Nicky and Andy a couple times, when they get into their heads about Joe. Slowly and surely, she explains why neither of them had anything to do with the pain he’s in, nor are they doing anything that makes it worse, as a near daily activity. And yet, applying that same logic to herself seems wrong and like she’s making excuses. That’s something they can work on while she’s here, and she says as much. 

“I think that’s a good goal,” Angela says, and writes it down. “Maybe we can also talk next time about your trauma, and perhaps about your-”

“I’m dealing with it.”

Nile turns her face to the clock and realizes they’ve nearly used up their hour, and she spent most of it in her thoughts. That’s what it must be like for the others, she thinks. Time moves so fast when you’ve seen so much of it. And it’ll only get faster. So she smiles and stands up, ready to give her place to one of the others. 

“I’ll see you next week, doc. Let me send in Andy.”

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @transnicolo. If there's a specific idea or thought you had about this series, pop by my ask box


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